LITMIR.BIZ

      The boom of cannon fire set the walls of the women’s tents to trembling. All night the bombardment had continued, a constant underpinning to the activity within the tents. The activity had ceased with the departure of the men. The women slept haphazardly wherever they found a comfortable spot, twitching when the cannon roared, but sleeping nonetheless. All save one.

      Aisse vo’Haav, assigned to the Warrior caste, crept carefully from the communal areas to the tiny partitioned section where the women washed, dressed and kept their few personal belongings. If anyone woke, she would have questions, and though Aisse had answers, she couldn’t afford the delay.

      She took the moments necessary to stop at the shrine to Ulilianeth, healer, seductress, protector of women, the only goddess in a heaven full of gods. Aisse felt the need for her blessing before embarking on her path.

      Ulilianeth had spoken to Aisse in this place, had shown her that things could be different, that she could live a life of her own choosing, free of everything that had made her existence into hell. In this place, women could say no. And Aisse intended to be one of them.

      She pressed a kiss to Ulilianeth’s stone skirt, then scurried to her corner where she ripped off the hated gauzy dress. She scrubbed herself until her skin felt raw, but still she didn’t feel clean. Aisse pulled the brown linen tunic from beneath her box, where she’d hidden it the day she bought it from the local boy selling bread in the camp. She put it on, smoothing it down over her thighs. It left her legs bare from the knees down. Studying her exposed legs critically, Aisse decided they did not look much like boys’ legs, too round and golden. She had to disguise them.

      A short while later, she’d made her coverlet into a fair approximation of the leggings she’d seen Adaran soldiers wearing. Hers were lumpy and threatened to slip down because she couldn’t tie the bindings tight enough, but they would have to do. She got out the scissors she’d “borrowed” from Piheko. She’d listened to Piheko bemoan their loss for days. Aisse would be sure to leave them where they could be easily found. In seconds, her waist-length mane of gold hair lay on the ground.

      Her neck felt cool, tingly, strange. But she didn’t have time to marvel at it or the way her head threatened to float away. Aisse gathered up the shorn hair and shoved it in with the straw of a spare pallet, scuffed the remaining strands into the dirt, and laid the scissors in a gap beside Piheko’s box.

      From her own, she retrieved the bag of supplies she’d been collecting—dried meat, hard cheese, biscuit, a cup, extra shoes—and knelt to peer beneath the tent wall. No one passed by. After endless hours, the cannonade was at last rising to its crescendo. The warriors would be mustering on the field before the city, preparing for the attack. No one would notice a boy slipping from the camp.

      She made it past the cannon, past the endless stacks of stores, past the officers’ mounts and the cattle waiting their turn to be slaughtered for rations. She could see the line of trees that marked the southern edge of the Tibran camp.

      “Here! You—boy!”

      Aisse froze, hesitating seconds too long before realizing she should run. Her face would never pass for a boy’s at second glance. But the Farmer caste tending the beasts already had hold of her arm.

      “What are you doing here, boy?” He yanked, snapping her arm painfully upward. “Spying? Off to tell your witches all our plans?”

      She kept her face turned away, hoping her hacked-off hair would provide sufficient disguise.

      “Look at me, boy!” He jerked her arm again.

      Aisse shook her head, trying to pull away from him. He swore and backhanded her across the face. She couldn’t stop the reflexive high-pitched cry. A girl’s sound, not a boy’s.

      The farmer grabbed her face with the hand not gripping her arm and forced it upward, until he could see her. “Achz and Arilo!” He called on the Farmer caste’s twin gods in his shock. “You’re female.”

      He shook her, violently. “What in seven hells have you done? By all that’s holy…” His voice trembled with horror.

      And it was true horror to a Tibran male to think anyone might wish to escape his caste, to think a woman might wish to live some other life. Women lived in the women’s quarters of whatever caste they were assigned, doing women’s work, available to any man of any caste who might wish to use her. Most Tibran women didn’t mind. It was the way life was. Aisse hated it.

      She couldn’t lose her chance at freedom now, not when she was so close. “Let me go!”

      Her elbow punched into the farmer’s stomach as she struggled. He grunted with the blow, so she did it again, kicking, scratching and biting in desperate silence.

      “Witch.” He shook her hard enough to rattle her eyes in their sockets. The first blow of his fist stunned her and she collapsed, held upright only by his grip. He waited till she regained her senses before he hit her again, to be sure she felt every least bit of the punishment he had in store for her. He told her so.